We carry values, but do we let them carry weight?
We kept the word, forgot the cost
We say we value honesty. Empathy. Loyalty. Presence. All the good ones, the ones that make us feel like we know who we are. The ones we want to be true about us.
But I've started wondering, did we carry them through our actions, or just claim them because they felt right?
Because the deeper I’ve dived into life, the more I've realized something uncomfortable: real values show up when picking them feels like choosing against your ego.
They often feel like inconvenience. Like discomfort. Like taking the longer route. Like keeping your mouth shut when you want to win the argument. Like showing up for someone when you're tired.
Sometimes it's not choosing revenge even when the opportunity is right there, waiting. Other times it's making the harder choice even if it hurts a little.
And more often than not, the values and choices that matter most happen in complete solitude.
When values become inconvenient
Honesty is easy until it means saying something someone doesn't want to hear. Kindness is easy until we're angry. Loyalty is easy until it's no longer convenient.
That's the thing about values - they only mean something when they're tested. If it's always easy, always convenient, maybe it's not really a value yet. Maybe it's just a preference.
I've caught myself being kind, but only when it felt easy. Or being patient, but only when I wasn't in a rush.
When I realized that, I saw how often I was chasing the feeling of being good, not the weight of actually living it.
The expectations we place on others
How natural it feels to expect the best from people.
We want our friends to understand our silences. Our colleagues to read between the lines. Our families to know exactly how to love us, without us ever having to explain it.
And when they don't, it hurts.
We say things like:
"They should've known."
"I would've never done that to them."
"If they really cared, they would have…"
But how often do we stop and ask:
Have I ever misunderstood someone too?
Have I ever hurt someone I cared about, without even realizing it?
Because I have, more than I'd like to admit, and almost never because I meant to.
Most of us are just doing the best we can with the emotional maps we've been handed. And sometimes those maps are incomplete. Crumpled. Marked by things we never asked for.
So maybe we should stop asking: why did they fail to show up the way I needed?
But instead, ask questions that ground us:
Can I hold space for someone who is still growing?
Can I accept the version of them that exists today, not the one I wish they already were?
Forgiveness is not pretending the hurt didn't happen. It's choosing not to reduce someone to their worst moment. It's remembering that just like me, they are still a work in progress.
And some days, that soft remembering is the most honest value we can live.
This is water
I want to share a story from David Foster Wallace's commencement speech, This Is Water. He starts with this little parable:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says,
“Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes,
“What the hell is water?”
The point of the story is that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones hardest to see, and even harder to talk about.
Real awareness is about learning how to think, but not in the academic sense, in the deeply human sense. Learning how to choose what to pay attention to, how to build meaning out of your own experience, to see what's invisible - as Cris explored in the last newsletter - instead of getting swept up in the current.
Because if you don't choose your attention, the world will choose for you. And you'll drift through life as if the water is something happening to you, instead of something you're swimming through.
Most days we forget
We forget that the traffic jam is not about us. We forget that the person in line at the pharmacy who's taking forever might be carrying a burden we'll never know about. We forget that the world is not a movie with us as the main character and everyone else just playing a role.
We forget that real life, the true work of being human, is not about achievements or how many goals we tick off. It's about what we notice, what we choose to care about, over and over and over again.
Most days, we swim through life not seeing it. But once in a while, we look up, and realize we've been surrounded by it all along. The small moments. The real connections. The ordinary of daily life.
And maybe that's where our values actually live – in the moments when being good costs us something and we choose it anyway.
And perhaps that's when we finally surface.
Not into a different life, but into a different way of living.
Andreea